toward an aesthetics of dread

8/17/2019 Toward an Aesthetics of Dread

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TOWARD AN AESTHETICS

OF DREAD

BENJAMIN BRUNEAU


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INTRODUCTION

The capacity to communicate meaning

through physical form is based on an en-

during human propensity to experience

common and stable meanings in the phys-

ical forms of things, including the design

of landscapes and built places. Such com-

munication operates in a different mode

from, and independently of, linguistic

modes of communication.1

The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in

London has hosted two projects in thepast decade that are as striking for their

similarities as their considerable differences.

In 2003, the Tate commissioned Danish-Icelan-

dic artist Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project ,

a massive, glowing, articial sun installed on

the ceiling of the 3,400 square metre chamber.

Mirrors covered the remaining ceiling space,

effectively doubling the seven storeys of head-

room, while mist was dispersed into this new


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stratosphere. The effect of the surrogate sun,

heatlessly illuminated by streetlight-yellow

monofrequency lamps and hazily shining upon viewers below, was profound enough an expe-

rience for critic Adrian Searle to describe it as

“numinous.”2 Viewers lay on their backs below

the golden orb like sunbathers on a strand, and

the hall became a social space, with groups of

gallery-goers lolling about for long periods of

time.

Conversely, Polish artist Mirosław Bał-

ka constructed an utterly opposite scenario for

his 2009 installation in the same space. Enti-

tled How It Is, the work was materially much

simpler: a huge steel box, like an outsized ship-

ping container some 30 metres long and thir-teen high, containing nothing. (Or perhaps,

Nothing.) Walking up the ramp to its single en-

trance, a gaping maw that seemed to swallow

light and sound, the viewer was presented with

a non-vista, an emptiness whose vastness belied

the nitude of the gallery, whose weighty dark-

ness could be felt like a velvet shroud. Enter-

ing with trepidation, one slow, shufing step at

a time into the depthlessness, each viewer was

severed from the group, singular and innitesi-

mal amongst the mysterium tremendum.

In point of fact, these two works were

part of the Unilever series, a larger series ofcommissioned installations at the Tate begin-

ning in 2000 that included such diverse artists

as Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nau-


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Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project , 2003


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Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, 2009


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man, and Ai Wei Wei. Despite the pronounced

thematic and affective differences between the

various works, the installations spawned by theseries were largely united in their engagement

of the viewer’s body. Each was designed to pro-

duce specic embodied sensations, cumula-

tively resulting in a particular affectivity. This

experientiality, harnessed for various purposes

by the participating artists, was no doubt the

reason for the exceptional popularity of the se-

ries, which was extended from a planned ve

year run to twelve.3 Art that bewitches the sens-

es and bypasses the necessity for deep art his-

torical knowledge or conceptual context allows

the direct engagement of the viewer, potentially

opening a space in a discourse that may other- wise be difcult to access by furnishing them

with raw material with which to begin speaking

back to the work.

The intention of this essay is to inves-

tigate these kinds of works, which I will term

“constructed affective environments,” that is,

human-made environments that trigger affec-

tive reactions in the people experiencing them.

This (admittedly dry-sounding) term is deliber-

ately vague so as to potentially cover disparate

terrain, from certain areas of the sculptural,

to installation art, to architecture. Disciplinary

lines are not so important as the circumstanc-es of the work: a constructed (i.e. reading as

non-natural) environment that produces in its

beholder a denite bodily sensation, in turn


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evoking an emotional response, without re-

course to language or strategies of representa-

tion. On the one hand, I am profoundly inter-

ested in the sheer efcacy of this kind of pro-

duction of space and its immense contemporary

popularity in the artworld, despite its dissimi-

larity to conventionally popular art forms (such

as the early modernist painting of the Impres-

sionists, or the Group of Seven in Canada). Con-

versely, I am troubled by the potential for its

misuse, either as a reinforcement of troubling

socio-political situations (a kind of false con-

sciousness or simulacrum) or a sheer abuse of

power (particularly from the perspective of ar-

chitectural projects, such as in Nazi Germany).Resultantly, I tender a suggestion for a kind of

art that is informed by the uncanny feeling of

dread , a subset of fear, and an important emo-

tional state that is potentially both transforma-

tive and reexive, and holds specic challenges

for the viewer.

Although my argument follows from an

initial interest in contemporary installation art,

as per the examples of the Bałka and Eliasson

projects above, I have not restricted this dis-

course only to art objects and installations. As

this breed of installation art reaches, by means

of scale and material, toward the architectur-al, it begins to partake in contemporary archi-

tectural theory around hapticity and the body

in space found in the work of architects Peter


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Zumthor, Steven Holl, and Juhani Pallasmaa.

Although land art, architecture, and installation

art are disciplines with signicant variances intheir goals, precepts, and practices, invariably

each is inherently and irrevocably tied to space.

Pallasmaa has written in relation to architec-

ture that “[a] building is not an end to itself; it

frames, articulates, restructures, gives signi-

cance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates

and prohibits,”4 while art historian Faye Ran,

in describing installation as a medium, notes

that installation works can “identify and create

space, transform space, activate, intervene, or

inhabit space.”5 Clearly, these kinds of activi-

ties can and should be cross-applied between

space-engaging disciplines. Art making at an architectural scale

has become increasingly common in recent

years. Large in scale, usually publically-funded

art projects invoke a relation of body to space

shared by architecture, as well as the land art

movement in the US,6 and the irreducible power

of objects in relation to each other in space as

hypothesized by the Mono-ha group in Japan.7

But these environments in fact operate by tap-

ping deep into neurological functions that pre-

date recorded history and the oldest art—evolu-

tionary functions developed by our most distant

homo sapiens ancestors. That they seem con-temporary and fresh is less attributable to their

recent rediscovery, and more to the repression

under Modernism of all of our senses save sight.


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Peter Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel , 2009


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Modernism tended toward dematerial-

ization, detachment and rationality, the classi-

cation and separation of disciplines,8 and anemphasis on the visual above other senses.9

Contemporary phenomenological practices,

like those of Olafur Eliasson or Peter Zumthor,

in contrast, can be viewed generally as a syn-

thesis and syncretism. Eminently felt and em-

bodied, it is fundamentally concrete in its pri-

macy of materiality, and necessarily affective in

its insistence on producing a feeling. The active

nature of this type of practice and its directness

of experience—what Pallasmaa might call its

“verb-essence”10—is a potent reconguration of

an art whose recent history has been steeped in

“disinterest” and distant contemplation. This essay will unfold in two parts. The

rst part will concern itself with elucidating

constructed affective environments of the kind

I have already begun to discuss, beginning with

an investigation into the Waste Isolation Pilot

Plant (WIPP) project currently being developed

by the United States Department of Energy in

central Nevada. The central problem addressed

by WIPP is that of communicating the danger of

the material buried deep under the site to a hy-

pothetical human civilization some 10,000 years

in the future, with no guarantee of sign-based

language to bridge the temporal gap. I will com-pare the WIPP project’s aesthetic goals with the

various concerns of artists and architects of the

previous 200 years, particularly Miroław Bał-


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ka’s Turbine Hall installation; the writings of

Juhani Pallasmaa; French Enlightenment-era

architect Etienne-Louis Boullée; and JapaneseMono-ha artist Lee Ufan. German philosopher

Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “elemental”

and recent neuroscientic research into haptic

memory will be specic theoretical touch points

in this section.

Critically, I will not attempt to exhaus-

tively, or even inclusively, describe all possi-

ble affective environments. To attempt to do so

would go beyond the scope of this essay, and

would likely fail regardless. As it is very possi-

ble that every space is (to a degree) affective,

insofar as the properties of a space necessarily

affect our mood and bearing through our sensa-tion of them,11 to describe all affective environ-

ments would be to describe all environments,

full-stop.

In the second part, I will consider the

ethical tonality of an art that appeals directly to

the sensorial and affective. Raising the question

of ethics of what Pallasmaa calls “authentic” ex-

perience vis-à-vis the society of the spectacle, I

will investigate the ne line between an affec-

tive art and the amusement park, problematiz-

ing Carsten Höller’s Test Site (2006), a series of

slides installed in Turbine Hall, and Experience,

his 2011 exhibition at the New Museum in New York. Finally, after examining more closely the

neurological tenor of various emotional states, I

will propose a particular kind of affective envi-


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Etienne-Louis Boullée, cross section of Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton, 1784(daytime view)


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ronment, predicated on and explicated via no-

tion of dread, and the context of its experience,

that aims to challenge both the viewer and artistin the context of the hyperreality of our late cap-

italist society.


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Carsten Höller, Test Site (detail), 2006


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for the “safe disposal of radioactive wastes re-

sulting from the defense activities and programs

of the United States,”13 it is unique amongstgovernment agencies in that its regulatory pe-

riod extends to more than ten millennia from

now. The WIPP has two critical, interdependent

objectives: rst, to safely contain highly radio-

active waste until it is no longer dangerous to

humanity, and the outside world generally; and

second, to prevent the premature exhumation of

that waste at a point when it is still dangerous.

Built securely and surrounded by materials that

block radioactive seepage, the only likely threat

to that mission would be intrusion into the fa-

cility by human beings at some future date, in-

nocently and inadvertently, or illicitly like graverobbers breaking into Pharaonic tombs.14

The Environmental Protection Agen-

cy, which regulates radioactive waste disposal

in the United States, believes that most poten-

tial intruders to the facility would cease their

activities and move on from the site upon en-

countering “passive institutional controls,” rec-

ommended in a report by the Sandia National

Laboratories to be:

(1) Permanent markers placed at a disposal site,

(2) public records and archives, (3) government

ownership and regulations regarding land or

resource use, and (4) other methods of preserv-ing knowledge about the location, design, and

contents of a disposal system.15

The apparent banality of these recommenda-


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Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site near Carlsbad, NM, satellite view (1996)


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tions is mitigated by the 10,000-year lifespan

of the facility. With such an enormous period

of time to consider, there is absolutely no wayof knowing who may come after us, how their

society might operate, or what their language

would be. In order to investigate possible future

scenarios, a “Futures Panel” was assembled

by the DoE to generate the likeliest situations

the WIPP facility would need to overcome. The

panel remarked unequivocally that it is “sure-

ly inconceivable” that any written language of

today would be legible 10,000 years hence, and

that even pictograms may not have sufcient

longevity, considering the signicant contem-

porary effort required to decode the symbology

of European alchemists of only a few hundred years ago.16

In order to overcome these uncertain-

ties, the panel suggested several measures, but

the most intriguing of these was couched in a

meta-discourse of the relative levels of com-

plexity of a message, rated Level I through V,

from simplest to most complex, respectively.17 A

Level I message would be the most rudimenta-

ry—that the site was not natural—while a Level

V message would include specic details about

the chemical makeup of the material. A Level II

message would convey the most critical infor-

mation: “What is here was dangerous and re-pulsive to us…[t]he danger is to the body, and

it can kill.”18 Such a message would have to be

communicated in the most direct, least-mediat-


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ed manner, free of language, and with a physi-

cal manifestation that would move or change as

little as possible over the projected timespan—that is to say, via an earthwork.19

Bearing in mind an extensive human

history of monumentalization, the panel needed

to develop a particular set of guidelines for such

a construction. Their historical considerations

were impressive in array: “keep out” messag-

es and non-credible threats were eschewed on

the basis of museum collections full of such ar-

tifacts;20 stelae or obelisks were considered in-

appropriate because these have long been used

to “commemorate honored phenomena”;21 and

anything too “art-like” risked being removed

from the site for veneration.22 A decentred orirregular composition of the site would guard

against ascribing too much signicance to any

given place, while constructing it of non-valu-

able material, like the stuff most commonly

found in the vicinity of the site, in a workman-

like and unornamented manner, would likewise

prevent kingliness and veneration, as well as

theft.23 Above all, the panel recommended that

the site be ominous and repulsive.24

AN AFFECTIVE ENVIRONMENT

Several site concepts were developed by

the panel, with such fearsome titles as “Land-scape of Thorns,” “Menacing Earthworks,” “For-

bidding Blocks,” and “Black Hole.”25 Though the

designs differ considerably in form, they are all


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Waste Isolation Pilot Plant “Black Hole” conceptual drawingby Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi, c.1993


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Waste Isolation Pilot Plant “Menacing Earthworks” conceptu-al drawing by Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi, c.1993


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extremely large—the Futures Panel compares

the scale of the project with the digging of the

Panama Canal26—and certainly intended to be- wilder and belittle a chance viewer. Most of

the designs involve serial forms of earthen or

concrete construction spread out over a large

area. It is quite impossible not to be reminded

of large-scale works of contemporary art, such

as Richard Serra’s Promenade (2008), installed

in the enormous Grand Palais in Paris, or Mi-

chael Heizer’s enormous earthworks in the Ne-

vada desert, like Double Negative (1969) or his

ongoing City , begun in 1972.

That such comparisons can be so easily

drawn is unsurprising in the context of the ac-

tual experience of the viewer in the presence ofany of these sites, and the WIPP panel acknowl-

edges the work of land artists who inuenced

the panel’s decisions, including James Turrell,

Charles Ross, and James Acord.27 Both the WIPP

proposals and earthworks, as well as some forms

of contemporary installation, reect what critic

and theorist Amanda Boetzkes sees as a gener-

alized aim of 1960s and 70s land art. Boetzkes

argues that rather than producing an object to

be looked at, land artists created situations that

required viewers to be immersed in the work.

Such immersion becomes a “‘lived experience’

of being absorbed in the space and entwined with the objects [there].”28 This argument is

modeled on the philosophy of phenomenologist

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whereby the viewer’s


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visual eld is informed by “the bodily sensation

of being surrounded in space,” but also through

“other perspectives that inform one’s own per-ceptual experience.”29 Thus the exhibitionary

space of an installation artist, whether it be the

Nevada desert or a gallery, is necessarily thick

with both relational data and the totum of sen-

sory data available to a viewer.

ELEMENTAL ENGULFMENT

Boetzkes also aligns this sense of being

encompassed with Heidegger’s notion of the

earth as “elemental,” found in the German phi-

losopher’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art

(1935). Heidegger asserts that natural materi-

als and forms repel analysis from our embod-ied perspective as humans, because they resist

both totalization and fragmentation.30 The phi-

losopher John Sallis describes elementals as

boundless yet sensible, insofar as they are high-

ly perceivable by us via our sensory faculties,

but also too vast to be perceived in their entirety

and too opaque to be taxonomized; and so they

threaten to engulf us, exceed us.31 Boetzkes pos-

its that land art (and other work that engages el-

ementality) operates by confronting the viewer

with the earth, which is not subsumable into the

artwork itself, and so expresses “temporal or

sensorial excess at the limit of representation-al form,”32 which in turn “confounds perceptual

certainty, revealing how elementals overow at

the limits of visual form.”33


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Richard Serra, Promenade, 2008


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Waste Isolation Pilot Plant “Spike Field” conceptual drawingby Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi, c.1993


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According to Boetzkes, that which pre-

cipitates such an aesthetic experience is not

de facto the source of affect. Rather, the mate-rial circumstances of an earthwork direct the

viewer toward the “sensation of elementals.”34

It must be noted that the “elemental,” in transit-

ing from adjective to noun, retains some of the

primacy of Platonic Fire, Air, Earth, and Water.

It shies away from an ideal and into viscerality,

although not outright “thing-ness”. Artist Lucio

Fontana bore this elemental idea in mind as

he produced his concetti spaziali. “The new art

takes its elements from nature,” he declared as

he sliced up his canvases, attempting to open

painting to “the cosmos, as it endlessly expands

beyond the conning plane of the picture.”35 Fontana already had a sense of the encompass-

ment of the elemental, and it is interesting to

note that he was creating installations as early

as 1949—in black rooms lit only by black lights.36

An example of an elemental force can

be found in the writing of philosopher and lit-

erary critic Roger Caillois, in his commentary

on psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski’s study of the

fear of darkness. Minkowski posits that the ego

is penetrable by darkness because it envelops

the body, confusing the distinction between the

internal and external. An excessive light would

seem to yield a similar effect—a blindinglybright light not only obscures vision but comes

right through the skin, even with eyes shut, illu-

minating the intervening blood. Such an exces-


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Lucio Fontana, Ambiente Spaziale, 1967


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Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, 2009(view from underside)


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sive sensation is bewildering, and of sufcient

epistemological threat for Caillois to compare

it to the plight of the schizophrenic, for whom“space seems to be a devouring force.”37

The devoured subject is assimilated in-

to a space of depersonalization,38 a sensation

that Mirosław Bałka utilized to great effect in

his aforementioned How It Is. Certain physi-

cal characteristics of How It Is were intended

to allude to various elements of the experience

of Jews during the Holocaust—the ramp at the

entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto or the lightless

metal boxcars prisoners were trapped in as they

were transported to the death camps39—but ma-

terially, the work is completely drawn from the

industrial aesthetic of minimalism. If the gal-lery patron encountering the work was aware

of Bałka and his oeuvre, she might assume that

How It Is deals with the history of the Holocaust

in Poland, as much of Bałka’s work does. But

nothing in the construction or presentation of

the work in and of itself necessarily speaks to

this; it is in approaching it, entering it, and be-

ing wrapped in the darkness that lls it, that the

piece begins to work on you.

Perhaps the rst and most basic elemen-

tal property engaged in architecture was time.

Great architectural works petrify time, declares

architect Juhani Pallasmaa.40 The Great Pyr-amids were built to withstand time, but in so

doing they rendered its passage visible, inexo-

rable, and far beyond the limits of human expe-


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rience. Medieval cathedrals too contain viscous

time in their cavernous interior silences, in a

manner Pallasmaa differentiates from the uto-pian timelessness of modernity, which “radiate

an air of spring and promise,”41 a feeling that

is perpetually immediate. Pre-modern work,

by contrast, detains time and connects us with

the dead through our own sense of mortality.

Time can be articially fragmented into min-

utes, days, and years, but these divisions mean

little to the chronograph that is our body. Time

stretches and shrinks depending on our cur-

rent emotional state, and human memory is fa-

mously unreliable, only registering moments in

rough relation to other moments; to know that

the earth is some 4.5 billion years old is not atall to understand it as a period of time.

Pallasmaa pinpoints polymath Leon Bat-

tista Alberti as the initiator of the ocularcen-

trism that has come to dominate Western ar-

chitectural theory,42 but moments of affectivity

and sensuousness have broken through since.

The Enlightenment-era French architect Eti-

enne-Louis Boullée is a particularly notable

pre-Modernist example, designing almost ex-

clusively for funerary purposes, and so with es-

pecial consideration for the emotive character

of his architecture.43 Absorbing lessons from the

pyramids, Boullée developed a three-prongedtypology for his architecture: a buried architec-

ture, which evoked the depth of the interior of

the earth through its implication of being par-


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tially submerged; and architecture of shadows,

the stone of which was precisely incised to max-

imize the depth of shadow on its surface, and anaked architecture of unadorned, natural stone

that would absorb light.44

From philosopher Edmund Burke, Boul-

lée took to utilizing not domes in his works, but

the uniform vastness of full spheres, which pre-

sented “an uninterrupted and unlimited view

that expanded the mind out into innity” to

promote the experience of “celestial feelings.”45

His Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton (1784) was

concerned with commemoration by intention,

but elementality by design, engaging the im-

mensity of nature by diametrically contrasting

it with itself. The theoretical structure was con-ceived with the creation of spectacular affective

environments in mind: by day, the central dome

of the cenotaph would be lit only by means of

drilled holes through the roof of the structure

recalling a starry sky, while at night, a central

armillary sphere ablaze with reworks would

act as a sun, searing the interior with heat and

light.46 Such an environment under a single roof

would not be seen again until the Eliasson and

Bałka projects at the Turbine Hall.

The WIPP panel seems to have under-

stood the power of the elemental, although they

do not cite the concept specically. They doenumerate a series of ideas they wish to project

through the construction of their site, however,

including:


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Etienne-Louis Boullée, cross section of Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton, 1784

(left: daytime view; right: view at night)


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darkness; fear of the beast; pattern-break-

ing chaos and loss-of-control; dark forces

emanating from within; the void or abyss;rejection of inhabitation; [and] parched,

poisoned and plagued land.47

All of these have the whiff of the elemental about

them, either in the sense of a natural force, or

uncanny limitlessness.

A SENSE OF SCALE

Although it seems redundant to say it,

embodied as we are, we are always surround-

ed by some manner of space, which is, to one

degree or another, affective.48 What is at stake,

however, is not the invisible moment-to-mo-

ment lived experience of space, but a consciousaffectivity—the subject’s sense of experiencing

a feeling in a place. We do not experience raw

elemental fury when standing before a re set

in a replace in our living room, despite the ma-

trix of smoky scent, glowing red heat and light,

and crackling sound of boiling sap and escap-

ing gases that emanate from the re. Howev -er, the same set of sensory data produced by a

roaring bonre, whose tongues of ame y up

twice one’s height, whose heat can be felt thirty

feet away, which lists and leans in the wind and

billows a pillar of black smoke, relays a mani-

festly different experience. It is clear that, underboth the phenomenological and Heideggerian

models of experience discussed in the previous

section, engulfng and exceeding the viewer is


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Werner Herzog, Lessons in Darkness, 1992(detail from still)


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Robert Morris, Observatory , 1970


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crucial, and the scale of a work would appear

to necessarily contribute to that effect. It is not

clear, however, what size a work must be in or-der to successfully relay that sensation.

The artist Robert Morris expressed the

difference between sculptural and architectural

experiences as a relation of one’s own body. In

his conjecture, sculptural space is separate from

personal space: we can walk around an object,

observing it, but remain autonomous. In archi-

tectural space, the perceived space and per-

sonal space are indistinguishable. As Faye Ran

summarizes, “[i]n the rst case, one surrounds;

in the second, one is surrounded.”49 There is an

implication of scale to Morris’ idea as well—the

notion that the sculptural space is circumnavi-gable implies that a work is ultimately diminu-

tive in space, whereas architectural space ex-

pands and lls, at least experientially speaking.

Likewise implicit is an interaction. Ar-

chitect Juhani Pallasmaa contends that “[t]he

encounter of any work of art implies a bodily

interaction”50 because we automatically mea-

sure the object or building with our own body,

unconsciously reacting and adapting to its

properties, “projecting [our] body scheme into

the space in question.”51 Pallasmaa echoes fel-

low architect Richard Neutra’s writings of half

a century earlier that architectural forces “arerecorded and minutely felt within our bodies,

within all the muscle we use in balancing our-

selves.”52 Recent research in neuroscience ap-


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Lee Ufan, Relatum III (a place within a certain situation), 1970


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Lee Ufan, Relatum (formerly Phenomena and Perception B),1970


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ences.56 Unlike the land artists and contempo-

rary “experiential” installation artists, however,

Mono-ha situations were neither immersive intheir massiveness, nor did they act directly on

viewers. The works of such artists as Lee Ufan,

Suga Kishio, and Sekine Nobuo were of a scale

and presentation more similar to sculpture than

installation; however, through the installation

material’s porosity to our gaze, activating our

nely-attuned haptic memory, some elemental

forces conjured by a Mono-ha work could be

projected onto us. Korean-Japanese artist Lee

Ufan wrote of his 1971 work Relatum (entitled

Situation at the time and later renamed), “it is

impossible to turn nature itself into art. Let’s at-

tempt to create something… in which we builda relationship between man and nature.”57

While land art constructions, being of

sufcient size to engulf our person, could act

directly on the human body, Mono-ha artists

intuited our embodied relationships to those

materials our haptic memory makes available

to us, and used those relationships as a medi-

ator through which to present elementality.

Their choice of material was thus clear: wood,

stone, wax, soil, cotton, metal, hemp, and the

like were of “nature” sufciently to act as me-

diators for elemental forces they wished to de-

scribe through their situating of those materialsin specic ways.

Therefore, despite their diminutive size

compared with the work previously discussed,


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it remains possible to feel the tension of jute

rope straining to hold heavy wooden beams to

a pillar, as in Lee’s Relatum III (a place withina certain situation) (1970), or the compression,

displacement, and cavity of Sekine’s Phase –

Mother Earth (1968)—although the latter ap-

proaches a comparable size to some contempo-

raneous land art installations.


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Sekine Nobuo, Phase – Mother Earth, 1968


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PART T WO:

TOWARD AN ETHICS OF DREAD

Ethics today means not being at home in

one’s house.

58

Although we have looked at a range of ap-

proaches by artists and architects to cre-

ating constructed affective environments,

up until this point I have not discriminated be-

tween them beyond them in any substantive way

beyond referring to the methods used by differ-ent movements, artists, or architects. In general

I have treated all architecture and installation

art as if it had the capacity for deep affectivity

and bodily-emotional response from those who

behold it. I do not, however, believe this to be

true in all cases. The second part of this paper will address my concerns in this matter.

French sociologist and cultural critic Jean

Baudrillard suggests that we suffer from a “loss


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of the real”;59 we live in a stage of Late Capital-

ism, where capital has “accumulated to such a

degree that it becomes an image… and socialprocess becomes utterly opaque.”60 It is an era of

spectacle, of hyperreality, where the world has

become a simulacrum bearing “no relation to

reality whatsoever,”61 which conceals “the fact

that the real is no longer real.”62 In this period,

spectacle is used to overcome the estrangement

we feel from each other and the world, says art

critic Hal Foster—except that the fulllment we

get from the spectacle is false, “because what is

offered is the very opposite of community, the

very instrument of alienation: the commodity.”

Quoting German philosopher Theodor Adorno,

Foster states unequivocally, “[i]n this way spec-tacle represents ‘the point at which aesthetic

appearance becomes a function of the character

of the commodity.’”63

Foster wrote this more than twenty-ve

years ago, but the vitality of his observation re-

mains apparent in the crowds of spectators who

pass through the halls of museums and art gal-

leries worldwide. iPhone in hand, we can snap

a photo and in moments post it to our online

presence—a site which, in effect, operates as a

personal archive of experiences to be lauded,

even envied. Foster describes this in a lucidly

prescient manner, pointing to the way we are“socialized less through an indoctrination into

tradition than through a consumption of the

cultural.”64 We nd ourselves in an economy


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of experience, of “lifestyle” and “brand identity”

rather than of commodity; or, to turn it around,

guaranteed experiences have become the com-modity de rigeur .

Thus, constructed affective environments

have a role to play in our societal relationships

and our relationship to the real, giving them a

specic ethical valence, which arises by dint of

being necessarily experiential . The outcomes

that arise from this experiential quality can

lend themselves to spectacular commodica-

tion, which for Olafur Eliasson “misses the con-

ict of things or purposely tries to ignore [them]

altogether,” or else they can be sites of resis-

tance, an opportunity to “co-produce reality.”65

In the following pages, I will build an argumentfor a means through which a resistance might

be mounted. This may not be the best or only

means, but it is one that I argue is already in

operation in many of the works discussed previ-

ously in this essay.

THE JOURNEY OF ENCOUNTER

The notion of situation arises so often with

regard to land art, Mono-ha, architecture, and

contemporary affective environments general-

ly, because the relationship between viewer and

work always constitutes an encounter with forc-

es beyond what may be strictly obvious prior toapprehension. Interaction with a body is neces-

sary to complete these works, for only between

them can the meaning or intended effect arise.


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Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Oddyssey , 1968 (still)


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James Turrell, Roden Crater , 1979–


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It becomes, in essence, an experiential journey

towards and through the environment, with a

beginning, middle, and end. Describing the experience of visiting the

Chattri, a disused monument in rural England,

philosopher Dylan Trigg writes of the initial

coming-upon of the monument as discovery in

order to emphasize the intentionality of its sit-

uation in the phenomenal landscape.66 That

intentionality is a key difference that oppos-

es the place of the constructed affective to its

surroundings. By “intentionality,” Trigg refers

specically to the presence of an intellect: the

difference between the constructed monument

and the landscape of elds and forests. Walking

up to the monument is incidental to Trigg’s par-ticular experience; more critical is the differen-

tiation between monument and site.

A more severe example might be the dis-

covery of the “deliberately buried” black mono-

lith on the moon in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur

C. Clark’s lm 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a

form radically simple and yet startlingly uncan-

ny, unmistakably the work of craftsmanship by

some unknown entity. A slew of land artworks

t similarly, especially when taking into consid-

eration the rural isolation works such as James

Turrell’s Roden Crater (1979–) or Celestial Vault

in Kijkduin (1996), or Michael Heizer’s City ,each of which retain an air of otherworldliness,

opaque to any investigation of purpose, yet

transparently intentional.


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Urs Fischer, You, 2007


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Less obviously related are works located

within a gallery setting. Minimalism moved

away from plinths and onto the oor, and in sodoing distanced itself from sculpture; installa-

tion takes its cues from there, relying on the be-

holder’s ability to differentiate the work from the

space containing it. (Of course, a given installa-

tion contains its own space that may extend up

to the very surfaces of the gallery space—though

even that needn’t strictly be true, as artists have

transgressed that space as well: Jamelie Has-

san busted a hole in the wall of the Forest City

Gallery for Beyrouth… is war art? in 1980, for

instance, and Urs Fischer ripped up the oor of

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise for You [2007]).

A particularly notable example of a galleryspace so detourned is Olafur Eliasson’s magnif-

icent The Mediated Motion (2001), a dreamlike

journey through four rooms that read always

as a gallery space, and yet have wholesale el-

ements of a natural environment embedded in

them. Beginning with a shallowly ooded room,

the water coated with duckweed, a single wood-

en pathway led gallery-goers through the cen-

tre of the articial pond. During the exhibition,

the duckweed grew and changed colour, as per

its natural cycle; but it also obscured the depth

of the water, and anything that might live with-

in.67 Up a ight of stairs (covered over with raw wood to extend the unity of the pathway, but in-

cidentally maintaining its porosity to sight), was

a second room, covered in clay-like dirt and


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Olafur Eliasson, The Mediated Motion, 2001


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Olafur Eliasson, The Mediated Motion, 2001


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rubble, on a barely perceptible but disorienting

slope, whose surface shifted beneath a walker’s

soles. In a nal room, a wooden rope bridgereached out into the depths of a fog-shrouded

abyss, with visibility truncated to a few arms’

lengths at best. An intrepid crosser found a

blank wall on the other side, forcing a return

the way she came.

In being regarded at the outset of an en-

counter, such a construction, asserts Trigg, dis-

rupts the constancy of its surroundings. Taking

a given region (e.g. the gallery, the desert, Tur-

bine Hall) as an “inconspicuous structure of ex-

perience, then by encountering the monument

[or constructed affective environment], the con-

tinuity of place in its pre-given ‘aroundness’ isbroken up into a critical relationship as a thing

discovered in the world.”68 Thus the encounter

opens into a newly liminal space that “balances

between inclusion and exclusion”69 produced by

the situating of the sensing body proximally to

the affective environment.

Trigg argues that this disjunctive experi-

ence produces an “ontological amplication,”

(an idea borrowed from French philosopher

Gaston Bachelard) whereby the presence of

the construct, and its affectivity, come to the

foreground, and its surroundings (i.e. what is

non-integral to it) recedes.70 What occurs nowin this foregrounded encounter takes on great-

er signicance; it has broken with the quotidian

lived experience of the beholder, and become a


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zone where alternative discourses have radical

suggestibility. The body remains integral to the

encounter, and is thus the terrain onto whichnew readings can be mapped.

BEING THERE

The 2006 Unilever commission for Tate

Modern’s Turbine Hall, squarely three years

between both Eliasson’s and Bałka’s, was Test

Site, produced by German artist Carsten Höller,

a series of ve corkscrew slides from the sec-

ond through fourth levels of the museum down

to the main gallery of Turbine Hall. The slides

borrowed conceptually from Roger Caillois, in-

tended to instill “voluptuous panic upon an oth-

erwise lucid mind.”71 A more recent installationof Höller’s slides occurred at the New Museum

in New York, for his 2011 exhibition Experience.

The experientiality of Höller’s work cannot be

denied. They truly need bodies to complete

them: a slide, for instance, is not really a slide

until a body literally slides down it.

But what is the outcome of the work? What

does the slider feel whilst sliding? Of Höller’s

slides art critic and historian David Joselit re-

marked acerbically:One zoomed so quickly through the oors

of galleries that I, for one, could think of

little else beyond maintaining the ‘safe’posture I was instructed to assume by the

friendly guards… I did my best to imag-

ine how strange and wonderful it was to


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Carsten Höller, Experience (exhibition), 2011


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59

glide through spaces where I had actually

looked at art standing on my feet before.

But even this…only made me wish that Ihad gone instead to Disneyland.72

Joselit is by no means the average visitor to a

museum, but his critique is salient: the epon-

ymous experience is brief and supercial, and

approximates a carnival or amusement park.

(Höller actually produced an exhibition at Mass

MoCA entitled Amusement Park in 2006.) If thisconstitutes a disjunction in Trigg’s sense (and

the pieces are surprising, and do produce bodi-

ly sensations), what occurs in the liminal space

now opened?

Reaching overly high, Experience curator

Massimiliano Gioni claimed of Höller’s work,“Society can be reinvented through the power

of laughter.”73 But Höller’s installations make

no suggestions about what could be reinvent-

ed, never mind how. They resist contemplation,

and yield little to extended consideration. That

is, if you spend the time contemplating at all.

Joselit’s invocation of Disneyland, conversely, isilluminating: it was Disneyland itself that Bau-

drillard used to describe the Simulacrum that

is the contemporary United States, a “digest of

the American way of life, panegyric of American

values, idealized transposition of a contradicto-

ry reality.” For Baudrillard, “Disneyland existsin order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all

of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland.”74 Höller,

then, is either saying that museums and art are


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merely amusements (a sentiment Baudrillard

would likely agree with), or else that life itself

is, a position untenable except for the upperechelons of the bourgeoisie. And yet if Höller

has intended to be critical, he has given no in-

dication, nor has his work been interpreted in

that manner. In the liminal space opened by ex-

perience, Höller’s work provides merely more

glossy superciality, a reinforcement of the late

Capitalist state of being and a distinctly uncriti-

cal position on society.

Rather than concentrating the museum-go-

er’s attention, work like Höller’s is capital ac-

cumulated until it is spectacle, a complete re-

ection of French Situationist Guy Debord’s

writing, and has deeply troubling socio-politi-cal implications. “Debord’s account of specta-

cle as multiple strategies of isolation parallels

those outlined by Foucault in Discipline and

Punish: the production of docile subjects, or

more specically the reduction of the body as

a political force,” writes art historian Jonathan

Crary, constructing “conditions that individu-

ate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even in

a world in which mobility and circulation are

ubiquitous.”75 Joselit cuttingly agrees, ultimate-

ly accusing Höller of presenting an “ideology

of individual sensation above all,” where “ex-

perience [is] privatized ‘fun’ whose substantialsocial costs are suppressed.”76 Viewers enjoying

the show have no need to pause to consider why

they are enjoying themselves, or what it means


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iPhone photos taken at Carsten Höller’s exhibition Experience (2011), found via Google Image Search


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to do so. In such an environment, the work ac-

tively obfuscates such inquiry, and in its com-

plete lack of aspiration, perpetuates a refusal toconsider alternative organizations of society. As

an exhibition, Experience only limply gestures

towards equity through the pseudo-democrat-

ic suggestion that everyone likes to have fun,

while insidiously positing itself as the best of all

possible worlds—having your cake and eating

it, too.

AN ETHICAL CONSIDERATION

If we learn from the above critique of

Höller’s work, then we have some idea of what a

more ethical use of Trigg’s “ontological ampli-

cation” might look like. First, it must be observ-able and appreciable; and as it is an effect that

occurs between the affective environment and

the subject, any observation must be (at least

to a certain degree) self-observation. Secondly,

there must be time for such self-observation to

occur. The fractions of a second from the top

of a slide to the bottom do not constitute a mo-

ment of reection. Finally, the subject must be

imbued with a sense of meaning, or change; the

encounter must occur for a reason, and the sub-

ject should take something challenging away

from it.

And yet the popularity of Höller’s work isimportant, too. Recalling the objectives of the

WIPP panel, the power of a message that is co-

herent even without context is not to be scoffed


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at; admission numbers at the Tate Modern cor-

roborate this concern. Is it possible to construct

an affective environment that promotes self-re-ection directed toward a shift in the subject’s

consciousness? Can we produce an art that en-

gages alternative political scenarios, and not

just alternative phenomenologies?

Let us return to the beginning of this es-

say, to Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is in the Turbine

Hall. The enormous steel structure supports a

deep, elemental darkness, in which the behold-

er is encompassed. As she ascends the ramp and

takes her rst steps into the work, the darkness

closes in, thick and palpable; it is a moment of

discovery , a disjunctive break from the regulari-

ty of a museum visit, a journey into a very differ-ent place. The scale of the darkness—vast and

yet suffocating—weighs heavy. Whether or not

she has encountered or read Bałka’s statement

of intent for the work, a communication is hap-

pening; and subsequently, should the subject of

the Holocaust arise, an image of European Jews

crammed into windowless boxcars, en route to

their deaths; or else of miners, earning subsis-

tence wages, now trapped in a cave in due to

unsafe conditions; or another human tragedy

of this kind; now this experience, which her

body has remembered in its awesome haptici-

ty, comes to play. How It Is is a machine for thegeneration of empathy, a means of connecting

across time and consciousness, from one per-

son to another.


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Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, 2009


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A SENSE OF DREAD

The engine of Bałka’s art lies partly within

its affectivity, as we have seen, but also in itsslow action, in which reexivity dawns. I argue

that this effect comes of Bałka’s use of a sense of

dread , which I will characterize as a particular

facet of fear in the pages that follow.

Jaak Panksepp, an American psychobiol-

ogist and neuroscientist, argues that humans(and all mammals) possess seven “endopheno-

types,” or core emotional feelings: seeking, lust,

care, panic, rage, play, and fear. These emotions

are both primary (i.e. not learned) and “pro-

foundly colour our emotional consciousness.”77

It must be noted that endophenotypes are not

emotions in the manner the word is usuallyused. Swedish philosopher Lars Svendsen pro-

vides an alternate structure for considering af-

fectivity in humans: he differentiates between

emotions and feelings. For Svendsen, a feeling

is primarily physiological and sensory, while an

emotion is cognitive and interpretive,78

a notionechoed by American psychologist Joseph Le-

Doux.79 Under this rubric, Panksepp’s endophe-

notypes are more like feelings, being attached

to the sensory function, but affect the emotive

function. These feelings are chemical and neu-

rological in nature, and were necessary for our

maintaining homeostasis, as well as our evolu-tionary survival.80 Of key importance is that the

interpretive level of emotions engages several

parts of the brain, including the insula, which


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er than a homeostatic one. To differentiate, the

term dread is therefore preferable.

THE BODY DECENTRED

Before we discard anxiety as a useful term,

consider this passage from Dylan Trigg regard-

ing the emotion we have been approximating:[T]here are many experiences and moods,

such as a generalized anxiety, that are tak-

en up and materialize through the body

prior to cognitive intentionality being

wholly receptive to the unfolding activity.

Indeed, one could argue that of all emo-

tions, anxiety is the only one that bypasses

abstraction and self-distance. In those ini-

tial stages, all we might feel is that some-

thing in the world is slightly disjointed,

without having fully ascribed that pecu-

liarity to an effect of the human body. Lat-

er on, however, we sense that far from an

atmosphere oating in the air, the discom-

fort derives from a precognitive action the

body has committed itself to. The result is

something like an uncanny tremor, as it

becomes evident that a part of our lived

experience has broken off from being an

immediate focus of attention.”87

Trigg seems to have a particular under-

standing of the temporality of dread, its slow

build towards a realization that something isdifferent here. The subject’s feeling of an “un-

canny tremor” is the manifestation of a change

in the subject’s perception of her environment,


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Mirosław Bałka, The Order of Things, 2013


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69

which Olafur Eliasson calls “friction.” For Eli-

asson, “[f]riction is needed in order to exercise

criticality; it offers the possibility of arguingfrom different points of view.”88

Dread is a particularly potent place of fric-

tion from which to critique bourgeois late cap-

italism because of its uncanniness. Uncanny

space, like that found in Bałka’s work and more

generally in environments that engage with

dread, is “a harbinger of the unseen, [and] op-

erates as medical and psychical metaphor for

all the possible erosions of bourgeois bodily

and social well being,” writes architectural the-

orist Anthony Vidler.89 The uncanny, nding its

discursive origins in the writings of psycholo-

gist Ernst Jensch and subsequently taken up bypsychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, arises from the

insecurity of a “lack of orientation,” as Freud

wrote regarding Jensch’s research. “The better

oriented in his environment a person is, the less

readily will he get the impression of something

uncanny in regard to objects and events in it.”90

Vidler links this notion of the uncanny directly to

dread because of their shared sense of “lurking

unease” and lack of a “clearly dened source of

fear.”91

Here we nd the crux of my argument

for dread as an ethical basis for a phenome-

nal aesthetics. In her study of elementality andland art, Amanda Boetzkes observes that “[t]

he self-presencing of the visitor does not occur

without a destabilization of the mode of con-


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frontation.”92 This is to say that self-reexivity

requires a breakdown in the subject’s sense of

the normative functioning of self and space—asense that something is wrong and needs to be

reconsidered. I assert that this breakdown can

be instigated by particular spatial conditions,

and particularly through the production of

dread. Through their deep, evolutionary-phe-

nomenological basis in materiality and Heide-

ggerian elementality, affective environments

that generate a sense of dread (a feeling that

originates on a neurological level) stimulate the

interpretive function of a subject’s brain to pro-

duce the dis-ease of uncanniness. This state of

dis-ease on the part of the subject subsequently

forms the basis for a disjunctive critique of theimmediate—and ultimately total —social space

that she occupies. Conversely, environments

that operate in the non-disjunctive mode of this

experiential aesthetics perpetuate and facilitate

the reinforcement of normative societal practic-

es and principles.

AN UNHEIMLICH HOME

At the head of this chapter was quoted a

passage from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Mora-

lia, a collection of aphorisms the German phi-

losopher produced following the events of the

Second World War. In his Reections on Exile,the Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Said

argues that Adorno’s prescription grants the ex-

ile, a person who stands in the “perilous terri-


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tory of not-belonging,”93 a unique position in a

contemporary society which is itself “spiritually

orphaned and alienated, [an] age of anxiety andestrangement.”94 Writes Said,

To follow Adorno is to stand away from

“home” in order to look at it with the ex-

ile’s detachment. For there is considerable

merit in the practice of noting the dis-

crepancies between various concepts and

ideas and what they actually produce. Wetake home and language for granted; they

become nature, and their underlying as-

sumptions recede into dogma and ortho-

doxy.95

For Said, the position of exile is an opportuni-

ty—though certainly not a privilege—to identifyalternatives to hegemonic institutions.96 Stand-

ing outside the familiar, dogma and orthodoxy

can be shed in order to powerfully critique what

was once too close to home to analyze. “Most

people are aware of one culture, one setting,

[while] exiles are aware of at least two, and this

plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness ofsimultaneous dimensions,” he concludes.97

Although we are not all exiles, and cannot

be in a literal sense, the disjuncture and dis-

ease of the dreaded environment provides a sit-

uation under which a plurality of vision can be

approximated. Empathy and the understandingof the conditions and perspectives of others can

only be realized with the admittance that posi-

tions other than our own exist, a hurdle that oc-


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casionally seems insurmountable. But present-

ing that position experientially, in an embodied

manner, can breach the discursive walls thatdelineate our homes.

To embrace environments of dread may

(to paraphrase Said) seem like “a prescription

for an unrelieved grimness of outlook” and a

“permanently sullen disapproval of all enthu-

siasm and buoyancy,”98 and it is most certainly

nerve-wracking compared to the human desire

for comfort and stability. Thus it is an ethical

position, an elective rather than a natural state.

Effort must be expended.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, to return to

an initial example, was born of an ethical im-

perative. A future culture that is unable to un-derstand a complex (Level V) message or sense

radiation, and yet has the technology to dig hun-

dreds of metres into sand and rock to reach a

concrete bunker full of nuclear waste, is unlike-

ly at best. And yet, if there is any chance that

some misunderstanding might occur, we must

be certain that all efforts were made to grant

perspective into the probable danger. And if we

are to survive until that time as a species, we

will need to ensure that beyond tolerating—or

even understanding—each other, we must over

and above all empathize.


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76

Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009: 141.

6. Boetzkes, Amanda. The Ethics of Earth Art .

Minneapolis: The University of MinnesotaPress, 2010: 147.

7. Lee Ufan. “The Mono-ha: Foreshadowings

and Premonitions.” Stanley N. Anderson, tr.

Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader .

Melissa Chiu & Benjamin Genocchio, eds.

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011: 244.8. Ran, 51–2.

9. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 18–9.

10. Ibid., 68.

11. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. The Architect’s

Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Archi-

tecture. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,2011: 191–2.

PART ONE

12. Trauth et al, F-39–40.

13. Trauth, et al., 1-1.14. Ibid., 1-8.

15. Ibid., 1-6.

16. Ibid., F-44.

17. Ibid., F-34.

18. Ibid., F-49–50.

19. Ibid., F-34.

20. Ibid., F-34–5.

21. Ibid., F-41.


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77

22. Ibid., F-43.

23. Ibid., F-51–3.

24. Ibid., F-12, F-54–5.

25. Ibid., F-57–8.

26. Ibid., F-142.

27. Ibid., F-135.

28. Boetzkes, 28

29. Ibid.30. Ibid., 15. The author provides a useful

example from Heidegger: a stone is resis-

tant to our investigation in that we cannot,

via our own faculties, see through it. In its

totality, we can only experience it as a stone,

with heaviness and solidity; should we breakit with another stone, it yields only smaller

stones, each equally inscrutable.

31. Sallis, John. “The Elemental Earth.” Re-

thinking Nature: Essays in Environmental

Philosophy . Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frode-

man, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2004: 137.

32. Ibid., 12.

33. Ibid., 19.

34. Boetzkes, 142.

35. Ran, 141–2.

36. Ran, 141.37. Caillois in Vidler, Anthony. “Dark Space.”

The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the

Modern Unhomely . Cambridge: The MIT


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Press, 1992: 174.

38. Ibid.

39. “Mirosław Bałka: How It Is.” Tate.org.uk.

10 Feb 2013. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-

on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-

miroslaw-balka-how-it-is/

40. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Six Themes for the

Next Millennium.” The Architectural Review

196.1169 (July 1994): 76.

41. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 56.

42. Ibid., 29.

43. Etlin, Richard A. The Architecture of Death:

The Transformation of the Cemetery in 18th

Century Paris. Cambridge: The MIT Press,

1987: 117.

44. Ibid., 116.

45. Ibid., 134.

46. Ibid., 130.

47. Trauth et al., F-42.

48. Mallgrave, 191-2.49. Ran, 160.


51. Ibid., 71–2.

52. Neutra, qtd. in Mallgrave, 201. Emphasis in

text.

53. Mallgrave, 203.


55. Ibid., 34.


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79

56. Mika Yoshitake. “Mono-ha: Living Struc-

tures.” Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mo-

no-ha. Mika Yoshitake, curator. Los Angeles:Blum & Poe, 2012: 100–2.

57. Lee Ufan in Yoshitake, 111.

PART TWO

58.Adorno, Theodor. “Minima Moralia: Re-

ections from Damaged Life.” Dennis Red-

mond, tr. Marxists.org. 2005. 2 April 2013.

http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ador-

no/1951/mm/

59. Baudrillard, qtd. in Foster, Hal. “Contem-

porary Art and Spectacle.” Recodings: Art,

Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Port Townsend:Bay Press, 1985: 79.

60. Foster, ibid., 83.

61. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Sim-

ulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Sheila

Faria Glaser, tr. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1994: 6.62. Ibid., 13.

63. Foster, “Contemporary Art and Spectacle,”

92.

64. Foster, Hal. “Readings in Cultural Resis-

tance.” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural

Politics. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985: 159.Italics in text.

65. Eliasson, Olafur. “Frictional Encounters.”


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Paradoxes of Appearing: Essays on Art, Ar-

chitecture, and Philosophy . Michael Asgaard

Andersen and Henrik Oxvig, eds. Baden:Lars Müller Publishers, 2009: 130.

66. Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phe-

nomenology of the Uncanny . Athens: Ohio

University Press, 2012: 87.

67. Boetzkes, 132.

68. Trigg, 87.

69. Ibid., 85.

70. Ibid., 87.

71. Caillois, qtd. in “The Unilever Series:

Carsten Höller: Test site.” Tate.org.uk. 16

Mar 2013. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/

tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-carsten-holler-test-site/

72. Joselit, David. “Carsten Höller: New Muse-

um, New York.” Artforum 50.6 (Feb. 2012):

219.

73. Warren, Tamara. “Carsten Höller: Experi-

ence at the New Museum.” Forbes.com. 26Oct 2011. 14 Mar 2013. http://www.forbes.

com/sites/tamarawarren/2011/10/26/

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um/

74. Baudrillard, 12. Italics in text.

75. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.

Cambrige: MIT Press, 2001: 74.


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81

76. Joselit, 219.

77. Mallgrave, 192.

78. Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Fear . Lon-

don: Reaktion Books, 2008: 21–2.

79. Mallgrave, 190.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid., 191.

82. Ibid., 866.83. Svendsen, 26.

84. Hollander, 871.

85. Ibid., 865, 870.

86. Svendsen, 35.

87. Trigg, 104.

88. Eliasson, 132.

89. Vidler, “Dark Space,” 167.

90. Freud qtd. in Vidler, Anthony. “Unhomely

Houses.” The Architectural Uncanny: Essays

in the Modern Unhomely . Cambridge: The

MIT Press, 1992: 23.

91. Vidler, Anthony. “Unhomely Houses,” 22–3.

92. Boetzkes, 142.

93. Said, Edward W. “Reections on Exile.”

Reections on Exile and Other Essays. Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press, 2000: 140.

94. Ibid., 137.95. Ibid., 147.

96. Ibid., 146.


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97. Ibid., 148.

98. Ibid.


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